Grand Duke George Mikhailovich of Russia (1863-1919)

Grand Duke George Mikhailovich of Russia (23 August 1863-28 January 1919) was a general in the Imperial Russian Army during World War I. He was executed by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution.

Biography
George Mikhailovich was born in Bielyi-Kliutsch, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire on 23 August 1863, the son of Grand Duke Michael Nikolaevich of Russia. He was raised in the military style (sleeping in cots and taking cold baths), and he reveled in drinking parties, gambling, and women in his youth, while he also had intellectual abilities such as painting skills. When World War I broke out, he became a Lieutenant-General in the Imperial Russian Army, and he became aide-de-camp to Czar Nicholas II of Russia in 1915. In 1917, he was sent to visit the Russian army corps in Bessarabia and Romania, and he was in St. Petersburg at the start of the Russian Revolution that same year. In 1918, he made the mistake of asking for a new passport and permission to leave the country from the Bolsheviks, who arrested him on 3 April 1918. He was interned in Petrograd, where Cheka chief Moisei Uritsky informed him that he would be protected from those who had attempted to assassinate him back in Vologda. Maxim Gorky attempted to convince Vladimir Lenin to spare George and the other captured Grand Dukes, but the order to release them came too late; George, Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich of Russia, and Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich of Russia were executed by a Bolshevik firing squad at the Peter and Paul Fortress in Petrograd on the night of 28 January 1919.